Tag: upset

When you get challenged by another person, your instinctual preliminary reactive response is to select from your choices of fight or flight. When you are triggered in social interaction, punching someone in the face, or running out of the room would be far too dramatic for anyone who might like to retain some sense of dignity in modern-day society.

Instead, we replace “fight” with self-defense and “flight” with withdrawal. We either post-up to do battle with words, voice inflection, body stance, and physical gestures, or we become more increasingly silent until we have nothing to say and look for more comfortable environmental circumstances elsewhere.

Of course, this is a spectrum and includes many options between these two extremes.

If someone challenges your competency in an area where you’re feeling you are confident about your abilities, you get an adrenaline charge which triggers your response system, which is primarily operated by your ego.

There is a lot of discussion about the ego, some believe we should have none of it, and others believe we would die without it (at this time I am among the latter) and anything possible between those two extremes. I believe the ego is vitally necessary but should be moderated by a heart-centered individual.

You are the result of a lifetime of experience and learning and far from the equivalent of any other being on this planet. While you may be able to get to know someone intimately and have so much in common with this person, you can never know the totality of what goes on behind the scenes.

Just like you know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no matter how well someone knows you, they cannot know what you are thinking when you are thinking, in the same way, you can never know what’s going on inside someone else’s head. Exponentially beyond this real-time unknowingness, you cannot know what anyone has experienced or learned from their life to this point in time.

When someone challenges you, it is a perfectly normal response to defend yourself, which may include a counter-attack. Obviously, “You don’t know me,” is a reasonable response which will always be true, but accusing whoever has challenged you, feels so much better, as your ego settles into a relentless position of exerting superiority over your challenger.

While you are feeling superior, you’ve now challenged the person who may not have challenged you with any malice whatsoever, as most people challenge motivated by love, compassion, or a sense of caring which is trying to help you live a better life by lending you some of his or her experience or learning. When you counter-attack, you call upon their ego to defend him or her. Now, you are responsible for having triggered an argument or debate, which is far from productive and rarely leads to a positive outcome.

When you and whomever you have engaged in this interaction with are engulfed in this vibratory mismatch, communication is not possible for you are communicating on different frequencies.

You carry with you an enormous cache of hundreds, if not thousands, of sensitivities which have been secretly stored in your subconscious, and are protected by triggers switched on as emergency responses by your ego as a method of self-preservation.

This is the natural state of your human response system. For those who are in the process of awakening, they are in a process of digging up these raw materials which are hidden from the consciousness and dealt with and resolved in a loving matter. Thereby eliminating the emotional trigger from the hidden past life event.

If you can find the wherewithal to love and accept yourself for who you are, you are less likely to become triggered by someone else’s challenge, and it will feel less like a personal attack.

You realize that in most cases this challenge is not an attack, it is only a reflection of that person’s life experience, learning, and self-confidence (at any level) expressing itself. So, it really is more about them asserting themselves, for whatever reason, than it has to do with you at all.

When this happens to you, you can love them, not judge them because you know they are only doing the best they can with what they have, thank them for their input, and compassionately bless them.

You just never know how wisdom will come to you. How about a man screaming at a woman and she holds up her hand flat palm to his face and asserts (almost screaming), “It’s a mirror!”

This is happening to me in real time across the parking lot. A man is screaming about something at a woman who is clearly with him. He’s outside the car on the driver’s side and she’s outside the passenger’s side and he is yelling at her, but clearly not about her.

I was far enough away to not understand what the man was upset about, maybe something that happened inside the establishment, or something else personal, but he was clearly upset and a little out of control.

The part that came out loud and clear was the woman’s holding her hand up between her face and his, and boldly asserting, “It’s a mirror!” Which would stop the man dead in his tracks, disrupting his explosive rant.

I could almost feel him going inside himself to take a look in there. After a brief pause, he would murmur, then get himself all worked up again. Only to be interrupted by the woman’s, “It’s a mirror!” again.

Now, I have no idea what is happening in real life across the parking lot, but what I am witnessing through the lens of higher potentiality is blowing my mind.

He might be a highly suspicious person extremely upset about breaking a mirror in the store which would give him 7 years of bad luck, but in my mind’s eye, I saw a man upset about anything. And I saw the woman as one of the most enlightened therapists I had ever seen in action.

For there is little that could be any truer than:

If you are experiencing anything in life that causes you to feel upset

It’s a mirror!

For those of us on the path of personal growth and expansive evolution, we know that when our caveman-like defense mechanism is triggered, unless it is an actual emergency, it is a signal indicating we have some unresolved issues to look at.

These are the sensitive, most intimate, and integral details of our life asserting their need to be noticed. For the most part, people are programmed not to look inside, and instead blame, feel threatened by, or threaten anyone or anything as we project our feelings of upset, fear, or rage on whatever is within reach at the time.

Some of us are better at seeing negative feelings as a mirror. I, for instance, have not mastered the recognition of the mirror at the first inclination to feel something negative. So, I am more likely to exert a negative emotion, than to first look inside for hidden trauma, unresolved issues, or answers.

Why?

Because I don’t have someone to hold their hand up in front of me to say, “It’s a mirror!” when I start to look at or feel something negatively.

This is the profound takeaway I was given in this moment in the parking lot.

And I pray, the next time I begin to feel a negative emotion or start getting upset about someone or something, that I can hear that woman’s voice in my head asserting,

“It’s a mirror!”

That would be enough to break my emotional state and cause me to look within to see what mysteries are waiting to be revealed.

Isn’t it time to reduce conflict at home? Sometimes people just can’t seem to get along and this leads to a lot of conflict at home, work, school, among friends, and even while driving. When you get upset at something that someone else does, says, or communicates in some other way, you are likely to experience some degree of stress.

The greatest stressors will be initiated by those whom you know the best, the people within your family. While the family unit is no stranger to stress, if there are little witnesses to these active familial stressors, they will be affected the most. This is how children learn to interact with others, and this follows them into adulthood, even if they cannot consciously recall these events.

Even if the conflict does not engage the children directly, they are still being affected by these stressful situations. If you don’t believe me, just think back to familial conflicts which you witnessed when you were a child. How does that affect the way you handle stress and conflict today?

If you have children around watching your interactions with your family, you might consider taking a break or a timeout, the next time you feel tensions building. Maybe you can reason with the person you’re experiencing the conflict with and pick up the discussion at a different place and time. You might be surprised that delaying the discussion will allow you both to revisit the topic when emotions are not running as high.

This works for adults, adults interacting children, and among children as well.

This can have a tremendous effect on reducing the familial stress in relationships, also, it gives whoever might be inclined to do some deep inner work time to reflect on his or her own past to see if there are any hidden anchors from the past triggering the feelings which are being experienced in the moment.

If you are in a relationship with someone and are not able to manage taking a break or timeout, then you might consider seeking a relationship coach, counselor, consultant, or a member of the clergy, whatever appeals to you and seek assistance from a qualified third party, someone you can trust.

There are many techniques which can be applied to any type of relationship which will reduce both conflict and stress, and it’s up to you to check it out and take the appropriate steps to change your life. No one else is going to do it for you.

This is your life, and those whom you care about deserve not to be impaired by your lack of control, and left to itself unhindered by someone’s drawing explicit boundaries, not seeing eye to eye, or having different points of view, could turn into an abusive situation.

If ever, any relationship is visited by abuse, you have the right and the responsibility to stop the abuse. You are never required to fight back if there is abuse. Just take the steps necessary to isolate yourself from any further abuse.

This takes a great deal of courage and determination, but you can do it.

“I don’t know what it is, but every time this person comes around, I get upset.” If you’re in a relationship, especially a close or intimate relationship with someone that drives you crazy and you just can’t seem to see eye to eye, you’re likely to think this is a toxic person in your life. Is this person toxic or angelic?

If you’re in the stage of personal growth where you need to extricate those people in your life who have a negative effect on your life, then setting boundaries to avoid exposure to others who tend to irritate you is definitely warranted.

But what if some of these people who irritate you are angels or brought into your life to awaken your conscious mind to something which is hidden deep within your self that can be the key to unlocking a brighter future for you releasing the flow for peace, joy, and abundance to envelop your life.

This person could be toxic or angelic

Life can be hard, and we can get accustomed to working very hard to have a better life. While this is effective and generally accepted as a good method of creating a better life for yourself by exercising your brute strength to make a change or evoke something better for yourself, consider there might be a better way.

A better way might be allowing yourself to go with the flow of the life you were destined to live, full of all the best things in life. Believe it or not, this is your natural state.

The moment you were born, you were perfect in every way, and all the best things in life were perfectly attuned to you. Yet, not long after you were born, you were subjected to the social programming of those around you which robbed you of your divine destiny. This continued throughout your life and you became acclimated to life’s struggle for survival. Yet, struggle is not your destiny.

If you look at the body chemistry of those who struggle through life, you can see high levels of Cortisol, the reward for fighting for a better life. For those who allow all the best things in life to come to them, they are rewarded with Dopamine and have very low levels of Cortisol in their bodies.

How you approach life makes a difference

The sooner you can start to change your thinking process, looking for precious learnings or gifts when your emotional triggers are firing, the happier and longer life you will have.

You can apply this approach to those who make you upset. While these people may seem toxic on the surface, they may have been attracted to your life at just the right time, when you were ready to consider talking some deep inner work which may be hindering your personal growth or potential.

This is common in romantic relationships, where we are magically divine mirrors, one to the other, reflecting back those areas of our lives where we can find deep work waiting to be brought to the surface, so they can be dealt with.

Remembering that we all get upset when we are triggered is a normal human condition. No need to berate yourself for feeling this way. It happens to everyone, especially the more we expose our true selves to someone who is close to us. You are not broken or in need of fixing. There is nothing wrong with you.

If you are a highly sensitive person, you will find you are more sensitive to the things people say or do, and even those things that are not said or done, as you rightly (or wrongly) interpret the meanings behind or underneath that which is obvious to the naked eye or attentive ear.

The basic function of triggers is to protect you from potential danger which may or may not be present but projected onto the screen of life. This is rooted in fear, and while this method is instilled in you to protect you, the fear of it all does hinder your progress.

Often, if you are in the process of excluding others from your life who do not make you feel good (though this may be necessary for a time, while you define and get acclimated to who you really are, it is limiting your becoming aware of those things which block you from the best things in life.

The next time someone triggers you, think about it. Ask yourself if there’s any shadow experience of belief hiding inside? There might be something lurking to be exposed and expelled when you feel like you’re getting upset, especially if your reaction seems to be more than the present circumstance requires.

Love is waiting for you.

Your greatest love adventure of all

Your greatest love will require vulnerability, trust, and welcoming all the good things of life, which long to be found in all things, even those which appear to be bad at first glance.